Mmm.. a second and a half isn't much of a buffer, so the server likely WILL need to keep several seconds of read-ahead on hand.

There is plenty of read-ahead in the client. A second and a half (32Kbytes of playback) is the rate at which the client asks the server for more data to top up its read-ahead. The only reason you'd want to buffer more than that in the server, is if you thought you could spin the disk down -- but the client doesn't expect you to be doing that sort of thing, and will (for instance) freeze the audio on track skip until you've spun back up. And bear in mind you could have lots of receivers; it's a caching strategy nightmare. Best to just keep the disk up as long as at least one client is currently playing (the UDP protocol does tell you this). That's what the Central does.

Peter